Various external sources, such as chemical, biological, or physical hazards, can cause work-related injury. Hazards may also result from the interaction between worker and environment; these so-called ergonomic hazards can cause physiological or psychological stress.
Chemical hazards can arise from the presence of poisonous orirritating gas, mist, or dust in the workplace. Hazard elimination may requirethe use of alternative and less toxic materials, improved ventilation, leakagecontrol, or protective clothing. Biological hazards arise frombacteria or viruses transmitted by animals or unclean equipment and tend tooccur primarily in the food-processing industry. The source of thecontamination must be eliminated or, when that is not possible, protectiveequipment must be worn. Common physical hazards include ambient heat,burns, noise, vibration, sudden pressure changes, radiation, and electric shock
If the physical, psychological, or environmental demands onworkers exceed their capabilities, ergonomic hazards arise. This type of hazardfrequently occurs in the area of materials handling, where workers must lift orcarry heavy loads. Poor working posture or improper design of the workplaceoften results in muscle strains, sprains, fractures, bruises, and back pain.These injuries account for 25 percent of all occupational injuries, and theircontrol requires designing the job so that workers can perform it withoutoverexerting themselves.
At anyworkplace, the employer carries full responsibility for any failure ofcompliance with the regulations pertaining to health and safety conditions intheir entirety. The Labour Inspectorate enjoys the right of access at all times and inall places to work locations, to monitor the proper implementation of healthand safety regulations.
However inpractice, there are many examples of places where for purely material reasons,the Inspectorate is unable to be present, such as oil platforms and logging inthe Far North. To overcome this problem, since late 1970s, Norway has developeda policy of transferring the obligation to undertake preventive measures in thefield of health and safety at work to the firms themselves. As a result of thisstep, the Inspectorate has been in a better position to target and adapt itsmonitoring of firms in the light of their internal health and safety policies.
Under Norwegian legislationconcerning the work environment, it is incumbent on employers to takesystematic steps to improve the working environment of every work station. In1992, regulations were introduced concerning internal monitoring of health andsafety at work by firms themselves. These new measures give priority to asystematic approach to health and safety at work, in contrast to thetraditional approach based on monitoring visits by the Labour Inspectorate. The1992 law renders this approach obligatory for employers.
This regulation was revised onJanuary 1, 1997 so as to facilitate the implementation of internal checks insmall and medium enterprises, which are less advanced in this field than the largestfirms. These texts are in their turn harmonised with EFTA's framework, which iscoordinated with European directives in the field of health and safety at workin the frame of the European Economic Area-agreement.
The underlying requirement of the newregulations gives emphasis to the responsibility of employers and this processdemands a democratic dialogue with the employees. The concept ofself-regulation of health and safety at work by firms is grounded in theintegration of these issues with the internal organisation of the firm,converting it into a contribution to the firm's overall productivity and makingit a management issue rather than a problem of extra costs.
Its basic objective is to encouragea shift away from a method of inspection led by the Labour Inspectorate whichbecomes increasingly detailed and burdensome as a result of the growingcomplexity in technology. It leads towards an assumption by the firm ofresponsibility for the establishment of a self-regulating health and safety environmentat work.
This also brings with it the needfor a documentation comprising elements such as a description of the aims of afirm's health and safety at work policy, a description of roles andresponsibilities in relation to health and safety at work, safeguards to be setup on the basis of a risk assessment, routine procedures for an internalself-monitoring system, and routine procedures for the undertaking ofcorrective measures. The action is set in motion by the Labour Inspectorate,but is implemented by the firms themselves.
In other words, the firms areobliged to produce an outcome, for which they need to define their own themeans whereby they achieve that outcome. These means must however be explicitlylaid down in internal monitoring reference manuals. As a result of theselegislations, the relationship between Labour Inspection and the firms hasundergone a profound transformation over the years as Labour Inspectorate nolonger checks machines, but instead monitors a firm's health and safety at workpolicy.
The implementation of thisconception brings about a significant change in the methods of labourinspection; specifically the process of inspection begins with an examinationof the documentation prepared by the firm. Thus, in the chemical industry for example as in all sectors,the law on workplace environment makes the employer responsible for theorganisation of health and safety at work policy. The employer must thereforemake it possible to assess risk factors at every work station and take thecorresponding technical preventive measures. It is also the duty of theemployer to inform his staff and worker representatives of the risks they faceand the preventive measures they should take in order to ensure health andsafety. Firms should restrict the amount of dangerous chemical products used atany one work station, and provide health and safety at work trainingspecifically adapted to the work station.
For the Inspector's part, he or she,by undertaking a systematic audit, would be able to ask questions concerningthe list of dangerous chemical products and the internal monitoring system. TheLabour Inspectorate therefore, as a matter of priority, examines thedocumentation on the organisation's health and safety at work policy as definedby the employers themselves. A certain amount of time is needed to set up thisnewly established system of inspection, but firms have gradually beenincorporated into it.
This process of change has hadconsequences for the planning of the monitoring activities of the LabourInspectorate, which is now in a better position to target its interventions inaccordance with extent to which firms are committed to an internal health andsafety policy.
Firms are categorised in four groupsaccording to the extent of their compliance with this new mechanism, and aspecific approach to intervention is defined for each category. The firstcategory embodies firms possessing the means and exhibiting effectivecompliance with new guidelines. Such firms in principle are no longer in needof technical monitoring. Firms falling into the second category are those whichare desirous to comply but, especially on account of their small size, lackingthe resources to do so. Such firms receive advice and assistance in the establishmentof inter-firm internal health and safety at work inspection services. Firms inthe third category are those having neither the desire nor the means to comply,while those in the fourth category are the ones which possess the necessaryresources but have yet to embark on the process. Firms in the last category arethe subject of in-depth internal technical monitoring, and risk incurringpenalties amounting to twice the estimated cost of establishing aself-monitoring system.
The procedure followed by the LabourInspectorate is very articulate and systematic. If a visit to a firm shows thatthe internal health and safety monitoring system is not in place, or if asystematic audit reveals deficiencies in the existing system, the LabourInspectorate notifies the firm that it must set one up or remedy the existingdefects. After each monitoring visit the firm receives a list of observationsand must remedy any defects within six months. The financial penalty fornon-compliance is calculated at least at double the cost of establishing theself-monitoring system. However, there has been no change in the structure ofthe Labour Inspectorate itself, although the training of Inspectors has beendevised so as to enable them to modify their monitoring methods.
Self-monitoring of health and safetyhas had organisational effects in the larger firms because they have needed tomake it an internal objective of each department. The opportunity to recruitinter-firm technicians in health and safety has been developed for the benefitof small and medium enterprises. The information received by firms has beenchanged.
Within firms, a condition for thesuccessful self-monitoring health and safety policy is the active participationof the social actors. Workers are supposed to be kept informed of the risksthey can be subjected to, and of the procedures which enable them to avoid orreduce those risks. They must adhere actively to these procedures since it isthey who will, at least in part, have to put them into practice.
The firms themselves have had torelease the resources needed to set up this policy, but it is believed that thesavings arising from the internalisation of monitoring procedures, especiallythrough a decline in work stoppages, are well in excess of the initial costs.In 1996, sixty nine percent firms who had set the system up reckoned that theimplementation of the health and safety at work policy could save themsignificant sums, while most firms expected to achieve positive economicreturns from a systematic approach to these issues.
The results of the establishment ofthis integrated monitoring methodology into firm activity can be evaluated onthe basis of two principal indicators. The first being the development of thepreventive methodology in the field of health and safety at work, and ofworking conditions within firms. Between 1993 and 1996 the number of firmscompleting the adoption of this methodology grew from eight per cent to fortyfive per cent. The second indicator is that the rate of workplace accidentsseems to be closely correlated to the adoption of the new methodology. Thus ina firm which had established this procedure since 1988, days lost per yearthrough accidents at work declined from an average of eighty in 1981-87 totwenty since 1991. The very small increase in recent years indicates that thepolicy has doubtlessly been less aggressively pursued.
The fact that the internalmonitoring of risk to health and safety at work has mainly been applied by thelarger firms has led the authorities to reexamine the mechanisms of applicationof the process. The changes introduced in January 1997 were based on theprinciple of adaptation of the methodology to the size of a firm, so that theefforts required of small and medium enterprises were only those which weretruly necessary and not the entire range more suitable to larger concerns.
The existence of a hardcore ofrefractory firms, who have resisted the introduction of the self-monitoringmechanism, has led the Labour Inspectorate to tighten up traditional monitoringprocedures on them after an initial period of tolerance. The approach describedhere is a particularly innovative one, based on sustained commitment on thepart of employers and also on the ongoing involvement of the staff of the LabourInspectorate.
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